With the RE pricing deal, about 250 US for an i7 970, there is already pressure on the 970 pricing.

I know, it wont make a direct impact on retail, but if you do look around, the 970 price has plummetted in re-sale value. So if the retailer/intel wants to get their inventory out, they had to drop pricing.

I'll "speculate" that one of the first S2011 CPUs could be a 3.6Ghz Hexacore (non-extreme edition)...that would be the next step

We know that there are only two desktop processors planned for S2011 currently - a hex and an octo. The rest are all Xeon processors (for now at least). So the only thing left to speculate on is the frequency of the desktop parts.

The octocore 4P part looks very interesting (SB-EX). A million PPD in a single box may be possible as early as Q4 this year.